Category: Spiritual Growth

Reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, I traveled so far and deeply into her world during the first 53 pages that I was dumbfounded how little time had passed when I caught a glimpse of the library clock.

This is what writers do, deliberate and highly competent ones, anyway.Suspend time, compress it, extend it.Good writers eliminate time, a mundane human constraint. There is no magic of higher wisdom.

Sermons and religious ritual, drummed dances, goddess-driven examination of entrails — none are as elaborate a bulwark against time’s threats as this writer’s potion of thought. Willingly submerged in the memories projected by this writer, we peek at her eternity mirroring our own. Qualities the world’s religions have been promising as they dither with meaning and subjectivity, are dead leaves compared to the poetry of written experience.

In The Art of Grace, Pulitzer Prize winning dance critic Sarah Kaufman explores the meaning of moving gracefully.While thought and reason are celebrated, it turns out our brains exist so that our bodies will move better.Those who cannot flee fast, fall to the predator.

Who wouldn’t enjoy following the sun through Europe to end on Summer Solstice in Scotland? That’s the premise for the author’s bicycle journey from Cadiz, Spain to Callanish, Scotland. is to follow the sun, a passionate interest of The author is passionate about connecting with people and explores the differences among cultures as well as the universal binding qualities of humanity. The trip took place a while ago, during the early years of the Common Market. Considering one of the finest travel books ever — Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Between the Woods and the Water” — was written decades after the experience, I fully embraced the timelessness of this enjoyable narrative where spirit transcends distance.

The author is well integrated in local habits, traveling as a slow-moving cyclist on a Peugeot clunker. He mentions being thanked for American assistance to Europe during WWII — that’s because even now in the 21st century, European folks of a certain age often insert a thanks for Liberation Day in conversations with visiting Americans.

The reader wheels along with the author. And it’s a great ride. Mitchell artfully describes landscape, the curious characters and the local cuisine. He never misses a human interest story and samples the local plonk, usually with a talkative companion.

Interwoven with the journey narrative are tidy summaries of historical or scientific detours relevant to the place, climate or festivals encountered by the author. Religious cults, folktales, myth, pilgrimage routes and culinary lore expand the thread of Hansen’s journey. He arrives in Scotland for the summer solstice.

En route, we learn of the westerly winds that permitted Christopher Columbus to push further west off the “edge of the known earth” and eventually sight the islands we know as the West Indies. This provides a segue into the solar influenced civilizations of the new world. Ever mindful of the sun, Mitchell discusses bird and animal behavior related to the sun and solar eclipses. We hear about the religious and intellectual growth of Spain during the enlightened years of Muslim rule prior to. He touches on bullfights and the Mithraic cult of the bull and sun, early Christian rituals, Greek myth, harvesting grapes and how to cut peat. All of it is fascinating material, lucidly presented. Alas, the book lacks an index.

Several times Mitchell mentions sojourns in Spain and France prior to this bike pilgrimage, so we can assume he knows the languages, always useful for independent travelers. Either he diligently recorded his previous travels, or he plays with memory. It would be useful to know whether he kept a diary at the time to assist memory and report past conversations verbatim. Many travel writers do this. For example, “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water,” describe Patrick Leigh Fermor’s walk across Europe at age 18; he wrote these books as a mature adult and occasionally quotes the people he met years earlier, but makes it clear that he was using detailed diaries as a source.

Mitchell acknowledges contributions from friends he met up with during the journey. While I believe it is possible for a writer to have vibrant memories of significant journeys and other experiences in life, it seems only fair to let readers know about invented dialogue based on memory. Then we’re more likely to accept that every encounter really took place and wasn’t a mirage or convenient authorial invention.

Ariel Glucklich‘s stories lead one into the next, step by step. Like climbing a hill, the dance of life and human thoughts, there’s a path to the light through the dark, on and on around the great metaphorical wheel. In this particular story, P. L. Shivaram, retired librarian for the Karnataka Power Thermal Corporation Ltd., leads the reluctant pilgrim, a biologist recovering from a long illness, up Chamundi Hill. The librarian nudges, explains and entertains during the long climb. The American pilgrim listens and comes to terms with various types of pain in his life. The hill serves as symbol and fact: representative of life’s path and a real homage site that people climb barefoot to honor the deities. Each twist of the route upwards offers the storyteller another opening to tell a Hindu parable. The pilgrim spills his share of stories too, balancing the librarian’s narrative of mythology with obtainable lessons gleaned from the shocks of an examined life. This charmed book could be Aesop’s fables – Indian style — with a week of dandy bedtime stories for grownups.

HarperCollins, 2003, ISBN 0-06-050894-9, Cloth bound, 246 pages

A slightly different version of this review appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, Celebrating and Serving Literature since 1980.